So one night I decided to try to make Game of Life as an FFGL effect plugin. It’s not so visually spectacular, but the nerd appeal level is off the chart.

The plugin rasterizes the input video into a grid of cells. It starts off each cell as either alive or dead, based on the brightness of the pixels. Then it applies the famous Game of Life rules.

This should probably be considered a work in progress. Right now the rules are processed on the CPU. Game of Life lends itself particularly well for a GPU based implementation, so we can get animation down to each individual pixel.